Cannes diary - 'A Mighty Heart' review

Angelina Jolie impresses in Michael Winterbottom's new film about the disappearance of writer Daniel Pearl.

May 23 2007

It's often suggested that the films of Michael Winterbottom are so varied that it's hard to find a common thread running through them beyond their diversity and frequency, yet the director's latest film 'A Mighty Heart', which had its world premiere in Cannes last night, is further evidence of this British filmmaker's growing desire to apply an urgent and committed cinema to some of the more controversial and pressing areas of current world affairs.

His new film is an energetic reconstruction of the disappearance of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi in 2002 and the tense five weeks that followed as his wife Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie) remained at the centre of a fraught international investigation until the discovery that Pearl had in fact been murdered by his kidnappers early in his captivity. With its extensive location work, a visual style that feeds on the appearance of news footage and documentaries, use of archive footage and its journalistic attention to precise details, 'A Mighty Heart' should be seen as the third film in a loose trilogy that includes 'In This World' and 'Road to Guantanamo'. Jolie is impressive as Mariane Pearl, portraying her as a calm, intelligent presence amid an investigation that was flawed by bureaucracy and differing attitudes to her husband's disappearance among, for example, the FBI and the Pakistani security services, the first of which were questioning of the latter's reaction to Pearl's disappearance. Indeed a strong theme of the film is the downside of global communication and co-operation as different interests and ideas and prejudices collide in the search for Pearl.

Before the kidnapping itself, Winterbottom immediately presents the chaos and uncertainty of Daniel Pearl's existence in Karachi, throwing us into busy street-scenes of traffic jams as Pearl (Dan Futterman) fights his way around the city as part of his research into potential Pakistani links to the British 'shoe bomber', Richard Reid. Within 15 minutes, Pearl is gone and the rest of the film leads up to the inevitable discovery of the news that its characters all dread. Winterbottom adopts a 'war room' approach to the story, largely basing its telling within Pearl's Karachi home, which fills with colleagues, police and other officials. This scenario is constantly punctuated with brief interludes elsewhere, such as flashes of Pearl's parents back home in America and of the Pakistani's forces applying torture to a suspect. The film is speedy and never lingers on one scene for long. Edits are fast and close-ups are abundant.

We don't see Pearl being kidnapped or during his incarceration apart from a reconstruction of some moments of the tape that his kidnappers released following his death. Instead, this is Mariane Pearl's story and we are left to ponder the Pearls' previous life together from several flashbacks (such as their wedding) and their life apart from both the terrible, wrenching screams that a heavily pregnant Pearl lets out when she is finally told that her husband is dead and the final shot of her walking alone with her child down a quiet Paris street.

As an American co-production, 'A Mighty Heart' feels like a bigger affair than those comparable earlier films mentioned above - 'In This World' and 'Road to Guantanamo' - and as a result it lacks some of their sense of improvisation and close connection to the grit of the real world but gains a wider, international canvas of political intrigue. It's never less than compelling and has a special, sad potency as the disappearance of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston now reaches its tenth week.

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